Soon after this, toward the end of a warm, windy April night, I awoke and heard them singing. I jumped up and went to my window. From the dock next to my father's, over the line of warehouse roofs, I could see the immense white sails already slowly rising into the starlit night. Quickly I threw on some clothes and hurried down to the docks. The waterfront was empty, swept clean of all that I disliked. Only overhead a few billowy clouds, the soft rush of the wind, a slight flush in the east, it was almost dawn. Here and there gleamed a light, red, green or yellow, with a phantom tug or barge around it, moving over the black of the water. Not silence but something richer was here--the confused mysterious murmuring, the creaking and the breathing of the sleeping port. And out of this those voices singing. I drew nearer slowly. Hungrily I tried to take in the details of color and sound. And I felt suddenly such a deep delight as I had never dreamed of. To look around and listen and gather it into me and remember. This was great, no doubt about it--it fitted into all that was fine! "This is really what I want to do--I'd like to learn to do it well--I'd like to do it all my life!" Slower, more fearfully, I drew near. Would anything happen to spoil it all? There she lay, the long white ship, laden deep, settled low in the water. I could see the lines of little dark men heaving together at the ropes. Each time they hove they sang the refrain, which, no doubt, was centuries old, a song of the winds, the big bullies of the ocean, calling to each other as in some wild storm at sea they buffeted the tiny men who clung to the masts and spars of ships: "Blow the man down, bullies, Blow him right down! Hey! Hey! Blow the man down! Give us the time to blow the man down!" But what were the verses? I could hear the plaintive tenor voice of the chantyman who sang them--now low and almost mournful, now passionate, thrilling up into the night, as though yearning for all that was hid in the heavens. Could a man like that feel things like that? But what were the words he was singing, this yarn he was spinning in his song? I came around by the foot of the slip and walked rapidly up the dockshed toward one of its wide hatchways. The singing had stopped, but as I drew close a rough voice broke the silence: "Sing it again, Paddy!" I looked out. Close by on the deck, in the hard blue glare of an arc-light, were some twenty men, dirty, greasy, ragged, sweating, all gripping the ropes and waiting for Paddy, who rolled his quid in his mouth, spat twice, and then began: "As I went awalking down Paradise Street A pretty young maiden I chanced for to meet." A heave on the ropes and a deafening roar: "Blow the man down, bullies, Blow him right down! Hey! Hey! Blow the man down!" Again the solo voice, plaintiff and tender: "By her build I took her for Dutch. She was square in the stuns'l and bluff in the bow."